I actually had the same question recently and Carrie Gilbert helped by providing me with some great examples just today.

To me I'm impressed (and somewhat obsessed) with Verizon's community. Of course, they have a lot of resources they can put behind a community but they've done a great job of structuring it and making it look great.

Sorry about that, must have been an issue when I copied & pasted from my webmail! You have quite a good list going on here, this is a great resource for anyone looking at an upgrade to 5.0. Thanks Claire Flanagan for starting this thread.

This is SO helpful. While I don't manage an external community, the variety of styles, themes and layout examples have been beneficial for me in planning a Jive5 internal site.

Infact, I did a screen cap of each of the sites referenced here, printed them out, cut them up and am now using all the pieces and parts to brainstorm my own community homepage. I can't draw so having something to represent what I want is super helpful.

I sometimes in a user testing lab and one test we ran was to ask users to design what they thought should go on the home page. They were given a paper with a header, and some stickie noties. It was a great exercise to see what was important to folks.

Yes, who would have thought that "arts and crafts" time would still be valuable in the Web 2.0 world. Believe it or not, this ignited ideas for me to make some changes to our current 4.5.X environment and it started us down a path for what we want to do in 5.X.

In addition to the ones already listed, have you seen any of the preview info for SAP's SDN upgrade? There's some pretty good stuff in there including videos which call out some of the main transition points to expect. Looks like their targeting early 2012 release, so soon. SAP's also running their Experience SAP HANA community on Jive 5 (happens to be the last community I launched before transitioning from Jive PS).

Hi - The SAP Community Network (SAP's user and professional group) went live March 12 on Jive 5: http://scn.sap.com/welcome. We migrated over 8 years worth of content from three systems (something well over 22 million pieces of content) in a single unified platform. My team and I have been working tirelessly to make it happen and during this transitional phase. In addition to supporting users, I've been focused on getting our new site's content back into search results. (See my blog for more details on the SEO aspect: Update on New SCN Results in Google)

Going through what I'm going through now (realizing the little nits about Jive 5 that . . . ) well I can only say - that wasn't a small undertaking!!!

We are going live this weekend with a "small" external facing community that we will be ramping up big time this year. I'm grateful we made the move to Jive 5 for this external community to get this knowledge under our belt to prepare for our internal C3 which has over 100K accounts, 5M activities (or more) a month, and is the heart of how we get work done. I am now a lot smarter about some key areas to prepare for that undertaking . . .

There were many, many little nits that we have to deal with but, despite some negative feedback from the community, it's really working: I just look at the main feed under browse watch as 2-3 new discussion threads are posted every minute during peak times. Good luck this weekend and feel free to reach out if you need any tips on SEO based on what we learned.

Jason/Claire - if I may butt in, we'd love to hear any tweaks/tips you made on SEO to make it work better. We've got a bunch of small things done in the latest code (back porting to older versions too) and want to leverage the good work done out there by you guys.